Shrines have gone through many changes since GCL. The current (work-in-progress, might change) system takes the variety of GC0 shrines, adds variable areas of effect (see below in a moment), and variable charging times (some shrines will charge up quickly, others slowly, to add even more depth to level design).
Previously, shrines stopped time while the long animation of thunders smashing, or even more, the slow crawling of the charged bolts took place, and after a (short) while could become boring and annoying, so in GC2 things will happen very quickly. All the damage and effects of the shrine will be dealt in almost a snap, with some visual effects swooshing and spreading through the battlefield.
There will be 9 shrine types, loosely connected to the gem types:
- Shrine of Infection (orange/healing suppression): stops healing for a long time.
- Shrine of Blades (yellow/crit hit): deals a percent of health points of targets as damage (that’s what GCL shrines did).
- Shrine of Wisdom (white/poolbound): harvests XP (the more monsters it hits, the more XP you get)
- Shrine of Focus (red/chain hit): charges spells (strike- and enhancement spells), the more monsters it hits, the more instant change boost spells get.
- Shrine of Venom (green/poison): deals a percent of hp as very slow poison damage (similar and comparable in usefulness to the Shrine of Blades; it deals more damage, but the slowly acting poison can leave them alive longer)
- Shrine of Time (cyan/slow): gives a much longer slowing effect than gems
- Gem Enchantment Shrine (note that it’s the only shrine that doesn’t have a suffix in its name, to emphasize that it doesn’t sacrifice the gem) (black/bloodbound): adds damage bonus to the inserted gem, the more monsters hit, the more the damage bonus gets.
- Shrine of Energy (blue/mana gain): harvests mana from hit monsters.
- Shrine of Corrosion (purple/armor tearing): a quick and powerful way to get rid of some monster armor.
What happens when you drop a gem in a shrine:
- The gem’s raw damage (no poison or anything) is dealt to all monsters (an other foes) in the target area
- A huge extra damage (calculated from the gem’s grade and other properties) is divided and dealt to all the monsters in range. It’s raw damage as well, but it also ignores armor. It’s good if you have lots of weak monsters (for mass killing), or a few tough ones targeted (so that the damage won’t get divided to tiny portions).
- The shrine’s special ability does its thing (like, you get mana after every monster hit, or all of them get their armor smashed) – the power of this shrine type dependent ability is based on the grade of the dropped gem (but not on its gem components). Each shrine can have one type (of the list above) that gives its special effect on targets (or bonuses it gives to you).
All these happen at the same time, you can see only one swooshing effect.
Why it’s good to have shrines such types when we have gems, you might ask. There could be shrines that work depending on the inserted gem’s type(s). That indeed could be a solution, but players would probably end up using only their favorite gem type in shrines, while pre-defining shrine types can make stages more varied, and giving some interesting challenges and situations, for example, a stage with no mana gain gem type given, but with some mana gathering shrines instead, or several spell charging shrines that encourage you to cast strike spells and enhance your gems frequently.
Shrines’ area of effect can be any combination of the 8 “main directions” (0-45-90-… degrees), and they also have a circular area around them – the more directions they shoot at, the smaller the circle; shrines with no directions added have a large circle target zone around them.
Amplifiers can boost shrines now, slightly increasing the grade value of the sacrificed/inserted gem that is used for the shrine effect calculations.
Shrines charge up slowly, but, just like spells, they can double charge too, in addition to charging faster while you speed up the wark (wave & spark) stones to call in monsters early. Also, the spark (currently) named “Glowing Embrace” gives shrines an instant charge boost.
Shrines will be less common than in GCL (as they won’t be buildable), but will still appear on many fields, and, very rarely, even a spark (currently called “Shrine Scroll”) can create new shrines in the middle of the battle (usually during long endurance runs).
Coming up next:
6th of August:
Shards, monster beacons
20th of August:
Monster nests, tombs
